Andrew Hudgins’s The Joker, part memoir, part joke book, is so fresh and original that it seems without precursor. Like a good joke, it doubles our vision, inserts anarchy into logic, pleases us with its felicities of phrasing, and stuns us...
Despite Dracula’s success and endurance, Stoker’s other works are unknown to just about any reader who has taken the time to travel to Transylvania with poor Jonathan Harker.
As soon as I began to ask questions, I realized how much work had gone into no longer asking them, into silences or re-routings, into omissions, not-noticings—into a carefully pruned rhetoric of absence. When I began to realize I wanted...
It seemed that every moment winter would touch its own back. The year’s last snow melted in the daytime, budded again overnight from sidewalks and car hoods, consuming into March and then into April days the deep patience of the most...
So much of what forms us is accidental, ephemeral-seeming. When I was young I knew I wanted to be an artist. Sometimes I wanted to be a writer, too, and make books; sometimes I wanted to be a singer.
Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.
Truth is the goal of the memoir—or at least of its preface. Such authenticating devices are ways of gaining trust in a distrustful world. And yet such a disclaimer comes up against the problem encountered by a fabricator coming clean: “To...
A century after his birth, Camus is still mislabeled and misunderstood in too many quarters. He was not a brooding, self-absorbed existential poseur, but a man of political and ethical commitment whose primary value was solidarity, the...